dodgy hard drive

TerrorFirmer

Hi,

Have a hard drive here, 250gb sata. When I try to boot the machine, I get disk read error: ctrl-alt-delete restart. Said machine works fine with another sata hard drive and also ide hard drive.

Tried dodgy one in my other machine and same thing - disk read error.

it is just plain borked or is there something i could somewhere be possible missing?

yoyo

Try running a hard disk diagnostic on it but yeah sounds like its broke, backup the contents quick if you can...

Nick

Adam

Yep, had that problem myself, though not with a SATA drive, basically the drive was fooked, never got to backing it up. I think you'll need an external hard drive enclosure to do this.

Ghost Train

well not a good sign if it was working and then came up with this message, the disk might be alright after you format it, but you'll loose any data, so that mightn't be an option yet

booting from something like an ubuntu live cd might let you access the drive, have heard that sometimes it can be a good way to recove data from a messed up drive

Adam

eolhc wrote: »

well not a good sign if it was working and then came up with this message, the disk might be alright after you format it, but you'll loose any data, so that mightn't be an option yet

booting from something like an ubuntu live cd might let you access the drive, have heard that sometimes it can be a good way to recove data from a messed up drive

Agreed, for a really quick fix get TinyLinux(i think it's called that...) and you can boot it off a USB drive.

TerrorFirmer

i bought it off someone on boards unfortunately, and last night was my first attempt at using it. had so much go wrong with this build i'm tearing my hair out. pentium d refuses to work in the board so i have to use it in my main machine and put the quad in this.....dvd-rom died, external dvd-rom also seems to have broken in the interim since last used it....and so on. :mad:

I'll give tinylinux a go, and i also planned buying an external enclosure or drive reader today anyway...

thanks guys

Ghost Train

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ or downloading what ever hard disk diagnostic tool on the drive manufacturers website might also be worth doing

TerrorFirmer

eolhc wrote: »

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ or downloading what ever hard disk diagnostic tool on the drive manufacturers website might also be worth doing

thanks, i'll give that a whirl later and see what happens

sdanseo

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

i bought it off someone on boards unfortunately, and last night was my first attempt at using it.

Tell the seller. If they're decent they might (should) take it back seeing as it was busted when you got it.

TerrorFirmer

sdonn_1 wrote: »

Tell the seller. If they're decent they might (should) take it back seeing as it was busted when you got it.

yeah he's been decent and offered my money back; I'll just run diagnostics first and see what happens!